Tristan Corbière

Tristan Corbière, pseudonym of Édouard Joachim Corbière, (born July 18, 1845, Coat-Congar, near Morlaix, Fr.—died March 1, 1875, Morlaix), French poet remarkable in his day for his realistic pictures of seafaring life and for his innovative use of irony and slang and the rhythms of common speech.

Educated at Morlaix and the lycées of Saint-Brieuc and Nantes, Corbière settled in Roscoff, where, apart from three years in Paris, he spent the rest of his life and wrote most of his only volume of poems, Les Amours jaunes (1873). His main themes are love, Paris, the sea, and his native province. His work has affinities with that of the Symbolists and with the harsher aspects of that of Charles Baudelaire, but he did not belong to any literary school and was almost unknown until Paul Verlaine included him in Les Poètes maudits (1884). His influence is apparent in the poetry of his near contemporary Jules Laforgue and in the early works of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

This article was most recently revised and updated by J.E. Luebering, Executive Editorial Director.

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